


A Priest And A Doctor

by JustAHumanMachine



Category: Original Work
Genre: Backstory, Doctors & Physicians, Gen, Just the backstory of two of my ocs, Plague, Priests, Religious Content, Rivals, Takes place over many years, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:29:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26805136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAHumanMachine/pseuds/JustAHumanMachine
Summary: There was a priest who could not stand the dead and a doctor who lived and breathed among them. It was inevitable that their paths should cross, and that there would be conflict when they did.
Kudos: 2





	A Priest And A Doctor

Demeter would never grow used to the sight of the dead. He knew it shouldn’t freak him out, that death was natural, and unlike a lot of the priests who served as his mentors, he sincerely believed every word of what they preached, that the soul, the person was elsewhere. But corpses still had an eerie, sacred feel to then, something that sent shivers down his spine, not to mention the scent made him nauseous. He didn’t know who thought it was a good idea to send him here, where the plague had left the streets filled with stench of rot and broken screams and sobs filled his ears. Demeter did his best for the living in pain, but he would not touch the dead. He knew they were needed, but he wanted to run as far away as possible, away from the sickness and death.

This lady was making things so much more difficult. Demeter struggled to explain to her that the child she held tight to her chest was sick, that they could help, that without their help the young boy would die. The woman didn’t budge and yelled at him with a rural accent so thick Demeter couldn’t make out a word she was saying. But it was clear she wouldn’t let him treat her son.

“Okay, listen, ma’am. Please.” The woman stopped talking, but the panic and sadness in her eyes had not abated. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Can you speak slowly and clearly?”

“There’s no use.” The old priest behind him didn’t look toward him as he continued to place holy symbols near the sick. “I’ve already tried to talk to her but she’s half mad with grief. The plague has killed her husband and two of her children. So she keeps using her peasant remedies and won’t let us near the child.”

Demeter turned back to the woman and child. The young boy was late in the disease’s course, and Demeter knew he was almost past help. So he continued to explain to the woman as he took the child - it felt dangerous to even touch the boy - and placed a few holy symbols before closing his eyes and beginning to pray, trying not to think about everything going on around him. When he opened his eyes the child was gone. The woman had taken him and ran.

Demeter knew he should chase her down, but to be honest he was glad to just let her go and finally get away from here, away from the sickness and death. He doubted the child would live, so he went ahead and put the boy’s name on the list of those the plague had claimed. Besides, what was one peasant boy in the count of thousands? He left as quickly as he could without running, trying to leave the domain of the dead.

Ten years had passed since that day, and the plague faded into memory as Demeter tried to shrug off the ghosts of the dead. He climbed through the church’s ranks, gaining power and respect for his genuine, zealous belief, and as he rose so did his reputation as a fanatic. But the people, at least, trusted him, and it helped that he was willing to help with issues his peers thought were trivial.

This was one such issue. There was a small orphanage on the edge of the city, shabby but kept with care. The lady in charge had heard he was there and called him there, and she explained as he headed toward the worn down building that one of the children had been acting weird. Always quiet, she explained as they entered the building, but recently had begun to speak in a strange and broken way, and exhibited dark and bizarre interests, like an odd obsession with diseases and the dead.

She led him toward a backroom where the boy had holed up. As Demeter opened the door, he noticed she hung back a few steps, as if urging him to go alone. Demeter, who had been fairly confident, began to feel a twinge of doubt, but he shrugged it off. He had nothing to fear from a possessed child.

The smell of rot and death hit him like a wave of regrets. It was subtle, but it still made Demeter feel nauseous, and it was made worse by its unknown source. The room was small and cramped, but he could hear something moving in the shadows. There was a long and ragged curtain along the wall, and there was the slightest cast of a silhouette along it as something moved just out of sight. Demeter steeled himself and brushed the curtain aside.

The room was just a small enclave, the walls dirty and stained, various pieces of trash strewn around the floor, lit only by a few small candles scattered throughout. But these were small, subconscious observations; Demeter’s mind was focused on the bloodstained table in front of him. The body of a large black dog, one of the ones he often saw around churches, lay on the table, its stomach sliced open as the scent of blood and death filled the air. Unaccustomed to such gore, the sight grabbed hold of Demeter’s focus, enough that he didn’t notice the boy until he stepped on his foot.

Shock snapped him out of it more than pain, but his reprimand died out has he took stock of this strange physician. He was a young boy of about ten, with dark skin and unkempt curls barely restrained by a red headband, small and scrawny enough Demeter swore his bones would poke out through his skin. The clothes he wore were so splattered with blood and grime they’d nearly lost their former color, ragged and full of holes - shouldn’t the matron have done something about that? - and the child reeked of the mess and rot that pervaded the room. The boy gave Demeter an absentminded apology in a heavy rural accent, one out of place for this part of the kingdom, as he continued around the table, holding a rusted, bent knife as he kept cutting into the dog, either unaware of or unconcerned with the mess that stained his hands of the fact that he was tearing apart a creature from the inside out.

This was the possessed child, it had to be. There was no other explanation - and yet Demeter was almost intrigued by the single minded drive of the boy as he searched for something Demeter didn’t see. So rather than immediately beginning the exorcism, when the boy walked over his toes again, Demeter grabbed him by the shoulder. “Listen, young man, what are you doing?”

“Didn’t kill it,” the boy said in a rushed, absent tone. “Just dug up the body.”

That was worrying, enough that Demeter wondered if he’d had to say that before. “Young man, why are you cutting up that dog?”

“I wanna see how it works.” The boy kept his eyes on the floor, kept his expression from Demeter’s view.

Demeter paused. “...you want to see how the dog works?”

“Don’t you?”

It was a bizarre question, and Demeter’s words froze in his mouth as the boy went back to poking around in the dead animal. “Hey, don’t do that!” Demeter pulled the boy away. “It’s a dead animal, you shouldn’t be cutting it open.”

“Why not?”

“What do you mean, why not? What on earth-“ Demeter paused, collecting himself. The child was certainly possessed. “Sit down, son, you’re sick. I can help you-“

“I ain’t sick.” The boy glared up at Demeter. He had purple eyes, Demeter realized. That wasn’t an uncommon trait, but it was relegated to peasants in the farmlands out west. Normally the strange, out of place child would have just been an oddity, but these traits carried an odd weight in Demeter’s mind. The room still reeked of death. He had to go soon.

“Listen, son-“

“Not yer son.” The boy wasn’t looking at Demeter now, just cutting into the dog and messing around with the organs as he talked. “My mum taught me more than you ever could anyway. She could deal with sickness.”

And your mother is dead, Demeter thought, though thankfully he managed to keep himself from saying that out loud. He had no reason or justification to taunt an ostracized orphan - “ostracized” popped into his thoughts before he really thought about it. The boy was holed away from the others, and now that he was more in the light Demeter could see how scrawny and scuffed up he was. Perhaps there were other reasons he was holed away - he shoved that thought down. Besides, he had noticed something else, a detail so small and light he almost doubted he had seen it.

The boy’s arms were dotted with small white scars - the remnants of some pox.

Normally, Demeter wouldn’t have noticed or cared. But the scars, normally just a few dots in a small stretch of skin, were all across his arms and neck, and it wasn’t a stretch to assume they covered his entire body. Something about this child was... off. “Kid, what’s your name?”

“Virgil.”

Demeter felt his heart stop. This boy was supposed to be dead. The scent of rot and death seemed to intensify as he recalled the woman with the child, one of thousands, the only one who had pulled away - Demeter cleared his throat. “Okay. I’m going to leave now. Don’t cut dead animals open anymore, okay?”

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

That response was less than ideal, but Demeter hadn’t expected a full turn around. He left, feeling half bad leaving the boy alone in the dark alcove, and bumped into the matron on the way out.

“Oh, thank goodness,” she said. “Did you fix him?”

“The child isn’t possessed.” With that he left, unable and unwilling to explain past that. The scent of death still seemed to cling to him, and he had to promise himself over and over as he trudged through the fields that this was just a fluke, a strange coincidence.

Either that, or the dead were following him.


End file.
